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Wake Up SEOs, the New Google is Here

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community.The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not
reflect the views of Moz.

I must admit that lately Google is the cause of my headaches.

No, not just because it decided I was not going to be not provided with useful information about my sites. And neither because it is changing practically every tool I got used since my first days as an SEO (Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Gmail…). And, honestly, not only because it released a ravenous Panda.

No, the real question that is causing my headaches is: What the hell does Google want to go with all these changes?

Let me start quoting the definition of SEO Google gives in its Guidelines:

Search engine optimization is about putting your site's best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines, but your ultimate consumers are your users, not search engines.

Technical SEO still matters, a lot!

If you want to put your site’s best foot forward and make it the most visible possible in search engines, then you have to be a master in technical SEO.

We all know that if we do not pay attention to the navigation architecture of our site, if we don't care about the on-page optimization, if we mess up with the rel=”canonical” tag, the pagination and the faceted navigation of our web, and if we don’t pay attention to the internal content duplication, etc. etc., well, we are not going to go that far with Search.

Is all this obvious? Yes, it is. But people in our circle tend to pay attention just to the last bright shining object and forget what one of the basic pillars of our discipline is: make a site optimized to be visible in the search engines.

The next time you hear someone saying “Content is King” or “Social is the new link building”, snap her face and ask her when it was the last time she logged in Google Webmaster Tools.

Go fix your site, make it indexable and solve all the technical problems it may have. Just after done that, you can start doing all the rest.

User is king

Technical SEO still matters, but that does not mean that it is synonym of SEO. So, if you hear someone affirming it, please snap her face too.

User and useful have the same root: use. And a user finds useful a website when it offers an answer to her needs, and if its use is easy and fast..

From the point of view that Google has of User, that means that a site to rank:

must be fast;

must have useful content and related to what it pretends to be about;

must be presented to Google so that it can understand the best it can what it is about.

The first point explains the emphasis Google gives to site speed, because it is really highly correlated to a better user experience.

The second is related to the quality of the content of a site, and it is substantially what Panda is all about. Panda, if we want to reduce it at its minimal terms, is the attempt by Google of cleaning its SERPs of any content it does not consider useful for the end users.

The third explains the Schema.org adoption and why Google (and the other Search Engines) are definitely moving to the Semantic Web: because it helps search engines organize the bazillion contents they index every second. And the most they understand really what is your content about, the better they will deliver it in the SERPs.

The decline of Link graph

We all know that just with on-site optimization we cannot win the SERPs war, and that we need links to our site to make it authoritative. But we all know how much the link graph can be gamed.

Even though we still have tons of reasons to complain with Google about the quality of SERPs, especially due to sites that ranks thanks to manipulative link building tactics, it is hard for me to believe that Google is doing nothing in order to counteract this situation. What I believe is that Google has decided to solve the problem not with patches but with a totally new kind of graph.

That does not mean that links are not needed anymore, not at all, as links related factors still represent (and will represent) a great portion of all the ranking factors, but other factors are now cooked in the ranking pot.

Be Social and become a trusted seed

In a Social-Caffeinated era, the faster way to understand if a content is popular is to check its "relative" popularity in the social media environment. I say “relative”, because not all contents are the same and if a meme needs many tweets, +1 and likes/share to be considered more popular than others, it is not so for more niche kind of contents. Combining social signals with the traditional link graph, Google can understand the real popularity of a page.

The problem, as many are saying since almost one year, is that it is quite easy to spam in Social Media.

For this reason Google introduced the concepts of Author and Publisher and, even more important, Google linked them to the Google Profiles and is pushing Google Plus, which is not just another Social Media, but what Google aims to be in the future: a social search engine.

Rel=”author” and Rel=”publisher” are the solution Google is adopting in order to better control, within other things, the spam pollution of the SERPs.

If you are a blogger, you will be incentivized in marking your content with Author and link it to your G+ Profile, and as a Site, you are incentivized to create your G+ Business page and to promote it with a badge on you site that has the rel=”publisher” in its code.

Trusted seeds are not anymore only sites, but can be also persons (i.e.: Rand or Danny Sullivan) or social facets of an entity… so, the closer I am in the Social Graph to those persons//entity the more trusted I am to Google eyes.

As we can see, Google is not trying to rely only on the link graph, as it is quite easy to game, but it is not simply adding the social signals to the link graph, because they too can be gamed. What Google is doing is creating and refining a new graph that see cooperating Link graph, Social graph and Trust graph and which is possibly harder to game. Because it can be gamed still, but – hopefully – needing so many efforts that it may become not-viable as a practice.

Wake up SEOs, the new Google is here

As a conclusion, let me borrow what Larry Page wrote on Google+ (bold is mine):

Our ultimate ambition is to transform the overall Google experience […] because we understand what you want and can deliver it instantly.

This means baking identity and sharing into all of our products so that we build a real relationship with our users. Sharing on the web will be like sharing in real life across all your stuff. You’ll have better, more relevant search results and ads.

Think about it this way … last quarter, we’ve shipped the +, and now we’re going to ship the Google part.

I think that it says it all and what we have lived a year now is explained clearly by the Larry Page words.

What can we do as SEOs? Evolve, because SEO is not dieing, but SEOs can if they don’t assume that winter - oops - the change of Google is coming.

About gfiorelli1 —
Gianluca Fiorelli loves to be known as father of two wonderful sons and luckily married to a great wife. He's a professional SEO, who will always consider himself an eternal student. He's a Strategic SEO & Web Marketing Consultant operating in the Italian SEO market , but he operates also internationally - offering International SEO Consulting with IloveSEO.net. You can find Gianluca on Google+ and Twitter.

162 Comments

Think its time to really push the inbound marketing message more then ever, Traditional SEO basics wont cut it for most niches you really need to push all the boundaries: social, trust, content, linking over and over ;)

Will I be jumping ship to PPC...no becuase SEO is where my heart is ;)

Can it be finally that Google is actually changing its modus operandi?

For way too long it seems every gaming tactic out there has actually been sparked by Google creating its own problem... focus on keyword density = keyword stuffing, too much emphasis on the link graph = gamed links, too much emphasis on social = likes & +1s for sale & the list goes on...

Is it possible they are finally taking an approach that isn't just exposing a new way to game the engine? Frankly, if they can actually pull it off, that would be awesome!

Even more importantly, if it is finally happening then your advice for SEO's to EVOLVE is imperative, but not just to take a different approach generally. Could it be time for some to finally accept that trying to invent the next big "Beat Google" trick is not only lame, but useless?

Yes, we will have to work harder, but I'd like to think we might finally be moving toward a time when we could all be on the same playing field - when we could all just follow the advice of our good friend Cyrus and put all our effort into Building Spaceships!

Now if we could just get them to understand that building the Web they want will be not provided without the best and most accurate user data possible. (forgive the grammatic license - I could not resist!:-)

You summarize well my own thoughts, Sha... and the Not Provided issue... yes, that is a big problem also and especially for those ones, who believe that this is the new paths Google is starting following.

But, personally, I see many contraddictions in actions about the "not provided" thing:

Google is under pressure about the privacy defence side (and remember, that is one of their war horses against Facebook);

Google is not a monolitic entity... Search, AdWords, Mobile... surely they fall all under a common corporation strategy, but it seems like the departments are somehow "fighting" one eachother in order to be the one leading the main strategy

Search (and Google Analyitics) seems to know well how "not provided" is huge problem, that is why we have seen a (not so convincing) defence of the query tool in Google Webmaster Tools from Matt Cutts and the (somehow patches) contributions by Avinash about GA.

I wonder in fact if the majority of the contradictions we see are a product of the constant battle to defend and justify every facet of their business?

All of those "bits" (no, we can't call them "products") have to remain separate because god forbid they should all work in unison and give the company the real power it would have at its disposal.

The consensus is that everything is simple when you're one of the most successful corporations in the history of the world, but to be honest, I wouldn't want to be walking the tightrope they must find themselves perched upon every single day!

Great post Gianluca and i am sure it will generate lot of discussion. Here are my views:

1. Technical SEO still matters, a lot!

Completely agree. I wonder why you used the word 'still'. Improper use of canonical tag can destroy a site's ranking in no time.

2. User is king

very true. The end user is the real king. I can ignore mediocre product description, jump through hoops of usability issues if there is some serious discount on a product i really want to buy but which i can't buy otherwise.

Fortunately i have never been hit by panda or any algo update and i think the main reason behind is that all my SEO efforts are user centric. If an article/post doesn't add any value to the website's business it never goes live. If such article is alread there then either it is removed or completely revamped. If you treat your website as you offline shop and try to sell trash (low value or duplicate contents) then what will happen. No one will buy your products no matter how well your shop is strategtically located.

I have never been a big fan of Schema.org adoption. It doesn't work on majority of sites and i dont want to waste my time on something which may or might work for my clients with small business. If things changed in the future then i can reconsider.

3. The decline of Link graph

I have not noticed any such decline. Nor i have seen any considerable impact of social graph on rankings. Directory & articles links still work, links through do follow comments still work, paid links/networks all work well, like the way they used to back in 2003.

Someone above called 'Google' a freemium. But it is not as we are the products of Google. Google is providing services in lieu of your privacy. Your personally identifiable information (email address, social profiles, online interactions, web history, buying behaviour, demography etc) is used to serve relevant ads on google display and search networks which is the major source of revenue for Google and its partners. Who knows where else our data end up.

I completely agree with Aaron wall's post that said 'Google uses organic results as a filler to pump deceptive ads at consumers'. Look at the SERPs of today. The first half of the screen is just filled with ads. Small businesses can't take advantage of blended search with any ease. Producing a professional video just to appear in video search is expensive. Not everyone can get into Google news. Same is the case with shopping results. So majority of the small businesses end up competing for that very limited 'classic organic listings' which is also dominated by big brands and review websites. For them opportunties to rank high esp. for non-geotargeted transactional queries (like 'digital camcorder') have shrunk considerably. On the other hand big clients with big budget can dominate the entire SERP via Google adwords, blended search results and regular organic listings. So if you ask a SEO who deals with only big clients, he will have nothing but praise for Google. For small business SEOs, Google is a SEO killer.

It is was me calling Google a "freemium"... and somehow - indirectly - you're phrase is confirming it (isn't privacy a price we pay?).

About the "decline of Link Graph"... that was admitetly a "sensationalistic" header. In fact I am not telling that link graph is not and will going to play a huge role in the ranking pot, simply I consider that - from what I am observing - Google aims to not confy just to it as holymighty range of ranking factors.

About the small business issue... certainly Aaron with his cruzade against Google monetization of Search is pointing to a real problem, but - to some extents - I see also many cases where small businesses succeed in winning the SERPs. Yes, right is 1000% harder for them, but - in my positivite vision of things - I consider that the extension of the ranking signal to social and trust can be the way to go for small businesses to win the big-dinosaurs-brands.

About the "still"... remember I'm not english language born, so forgive me... :D

As long as i know 'freemium' is a business model (like seomoz) that offer basic services free of cost but charges a premium for advanced services. But Google is not offering any thing for free. We pay for every type of service via giving away our personal details/habits even when we do un-logged searches Google still track keywords usage and web trends which help advertisers. Since loosing privacy is such a huge price, i think Google is a premium service.

May be i got carried away by the headline :)

I am still waiting to see a small brand making a huge impact in a competitive space through social and trust.

There are some very interesting points made around the subject of SMB's (SME's -small business enterprise in the UK), that I think deserves more attention. I've been working freelance for the last 1 1/2 years and one of my clients is an SMB in the video production sector, based in London - extremely crowded market place for sure.

Google has been a great asset, to their business and I'm glad to say they made ROI on their investment in me. If I am to look back on why they achieved this success (not wishing to blow my own trumpet here) this is what I found.

1. We were able between us to really explore their market, their business and get under the skin of their business goals, and what already exits as an opportunity for them - bingo - we found their niche

2. Dominate that niche in all areas of marketing - and yes by that I mean offline as well. Having all marketing channels aligned to the mission and vision - crucial for small businesses

3. They were willing to be flexible. That is the beauty of smaller companies, they are more flexible, and therefore more dynamic and able to react fast to the ever changing landscape in SEO/online marketing

4. By developing their inner voice about who they are in the market place - they become the expert, the go-to people on a specialist subject

5. They have networked tirelessly with success companies and people in the music space and developing real relationships - bingo links become more possible, with credibility/trust passed on,

All in all, its having broad palette of marketing strategies in a specific niche that has helped my client as an SMB.

Also, Himanshu, regards video production - the costs for video production are at an all time low. There are also a plethora of very talented video producer graduates, who will in most cases do a project for free/minimum cost/a few beers/promise of paid work on future projects so as to add to their portfolio.

I wouldn't do a video just to get position in SERPs as you rightly say - but theirs certainly opportunities in a many sectors, from my perspective and what I see of SERPs in UK. I'll stop banging on about video now:-)

Firstly, awesome post about where SEO has come to now and what/where it is an SEO should be focusing their efforts. The point you've made for an SEO to make sure the foundations of the website are sound before working on the interior of the site is key. We see so many sites coming to us in such a poor condition mechanically, it's a miracle their websites haven't been sent to the depths of Google hell. Another question is, how are they in this state in the first place? Bad web dev agencies? The way the web has developed since the website was constructed? We could think of a 1000 reasons!

I totally agree with "The next time you hear someone saying “Content is King” or “Social is the new link building”, snap her face and ask her when it was the last time she logged in Google Webmaster Tools." I'm always very skeptical when I see people tweeting these things, it isn't that Content is King, but it is Content has become a significant factor in a huge cycle, that is SEO.

It'd be really interesting to see you do another article this time next year Gianluca and see how much has changed in just a year? Since I started in SEO almost 5 months ago, so much has changed - it's awesome.

I've only graduated from University this year and I have been in SEO for nearly 5 months now, but in that short amount of time I've followed your tweets and blog posts closely Gianluca. You're a great source of knowledge and opinion within the SEO industry - keep it up!

PS. I really like The Inbounder Graph, a really accurate representation of our jobs at this current time.

I've seen so many mentions of "new Google" and (worse) "new SEO" as an eye-catching title today, it's kind of ridiculous. Not to say this isn't a good article with good things to be watching (it is, especially that quote from Larry Page), but after reading this entire article and way too many tweets just this morning, I don't see anything about a good SEO process that's truly new and groundbreaking. Sure, Panda iterations and Google+ features have left people putting additional weight on the user experience, social indicators, and so on.

But social indicators mattering more today than they did yesterday shouldn't really be news to anyone that's followed SEO over the past 5 years, and optimizing for the user experience first has been at the aboslute core of white hat SEO for at least a decade. The fact that Google is going to get better at analyzing these factors has also basically been a constant (albeit with some bumps in the road). It seems to change the results, but not the ideal means.

I like what you say. But new is not always the same as saying as "never done before.
Renaissance was a re-interpretation of Greek-roman aesthetic and the iPad was already invented by Stanley Kubrik.
So, somehow you are right saying that this Google is not new, but it is indeed, because straordinary new is the effort it is having in doing their shit done... their way.

Good stuff here. I appreciate that you started with technical SEO, then went to other considerations for online marketing. Oftentimes people get so focused on the "other" activities that they (we) forget to do the first steps.

I know that Google is heading in the direction of social counting a lot more towards SEO/rankings, but I'm struggling to find the balance. Traditional linkbuilding still works, that's a fact. Social is...murky, to say the least. I'm just not sure where the balance is, and maybe the balance is different for each client/site.

You know John? Mine is just a speculation, dictated from experiences and from what I see and feel Google is doing; but surely there are facets to my interpration of fact as valid as mine.
But I firmly believe that Google is going to that kind of graphs merging, and being none predominant you can also understand how none singularly is and will be determinant.
The most "revolutionary" concept of my idea is that now the old definition of "holistic" really is going to have a real sense.

gfiorelli1 You Have given a new definition of the future SEO with the future points of Google! The SEO is going to be the median point of Content marketing,social media and technical seo. And I agree to you that Trust Factor plays very important role in the point of view of Search engines as well as visitors. e.g. Whenever anybody searches for my name in Search engines,the SERP shows my profiles of SEOmoz first because the Moz profiles have got good decent PA. and this makes the Search engines believe to show th moz profiles first and in the same way the Visitor gives more trust factor when he gets to see the trusted profiles in trusted sites. But Alas! that too can be gamed yet it needs lots of efforts! I appreciate your sentence :"SEO is not dyening" .. i am Happy now!!!

Couldn't agree with you more on the technical bit. BASICS!! if Google can't see/crawl/index your site, then content and links barely matter!! And on the converse, if Google is indexing/crawling/ranking too much of your site (duplicate content), equally bad!

Fixing those things can supercharge the links and content you ALREADY have!!

And I think no matter the signals or forms of measurement. Trust is trust is trust. Your website will mirror who you or your company is in real life. Even if you try to fake it, that will catch up with you. Social is just another step in that direction, and Google knows this.

If you try to cut corners in life, just like no one will come back and do business with you, your website isn't going to rank well either.

Must say the title of the post is really an apt and a catchy one. Yes Google is changing and I think changing for the better with the evolution of the web as the basis which will bring the quality in the search results as an offshoot.

The lesser importance to PageRank

An increased importance to social signals

The introduction of schema.org, The and tags establishing author identity

The series of Panda Updates in2011

The integration of GA and GWT

The security update which resulted in the "not provided" keyword in GA , etc.

are all efforts to remove the unwanted content and website clutter ( Like the unwanted spammy websites which came into existence purely for link purposes infecting the web with link spam, the content clutter in the form of blogs, spammy comments, etc.) from the web and clear the web ecosystem .

2011 changes and updates by Google are only the foundation stone for building a better edifice of search experience for users which shall be reflected in the form of every website owner benefitting not only from the content that he writes for his online identity but also by the aggregate of all the UGC for that identity in the form of social signals, reviews, comments, etc.

As I always say that whatever we write on our website is what we want to say about our business , social media signals and all the UGC is what others say about your business , when both these messages are in sync a credibility and trust is established .

With all these updates the endeavor as a whole is to work out the trust factor . As Matt Cutts said they do not have a Trust Rank like the PageRank but they do have a trust factor.

The irony is that the PageRank which is supposed to determine the goodwill, popularity and thereby the trust factor has been the main root cause for the extensive link spam on the web and to clear all these traces from the web Google has to work out on the credibility of each aspect of the PageRank to assess the trust factor and the major help will come from the social signals and the UGC.

Thanks for a great post! I especially loved your visuals of the link/social/trust graphs. Thinking of Google, there are two things they've said in the past that bother me now:

1. They said they wanted to "organize the world's information". That may not be the direct quote, but it's close enough. But their recent actions suggest they not only want to organize it, they want to control how we interact with it too. In fact, they are even predicting how we will engage with the content, and even as they are expanding formats with the likes of Caffeine, they're pushing us into a more and more narrow view of the information.

2. They said that SEO's should design their sites for users. A long time ago, they said not to do anything on our sites solely for the benefit of the search engines if it didn't also help the users. This is my major problem with the schema.org tags. They're giving benefit to sites that implement them, even though you have to be adding them specifically for search engines (because why else would you add extra code to your pages that you don't need for them to function?). Overall, I'm uncomfortable with just how much they want SEOs/webmasters to do for them, instead of redoubling their efforts to figure things out on their own.

I'd love to know what the rest of the community thinks about that. Am I just old-fashioned in wanting Google to be consistent? Am I being too critical when I call them hypocrites about some things?

The sad reality is that Google is a business. And the goal of a business is not to reach a break-even point, or even to make a comfortable profit. Big businesses like Google, Microsoft, Apple, et al. is to constantly increase their bottom line. No investor is going to look too seriously at a company that's merely maintaining a minimum margin. They want growth, they want profit, they want increased marketshare.

And that's really the point in the game that Google's reaching. They've kind of been seen as a massive, benevolent Internet god because of their seemingly philanthropic expansion of free services. As cynical as it sounds, it's a sham. Google wants money. And the main way they get money is by analyzing and selling your consumption behavior.

I wrote a post (self-promotion, yes, but it's relevant) on Google's information monopoly. It's absurd how overtly they're betraying the common user for profit. I felt a little like a hippie talking about "The Man" in that post, but really, I don't see how anyone can refute it. Google's "Don't Be Evil" is dead and gone.

I don't know that I'd say that this is "The New Google" but rather "The Unmasked Google". It's not like they're doing much they haven't been doing before (except, yknow, taking away keyword referral info), it's just that now they're being less secretive about it.

Hi Gianluca, nice post! I think it's a great start for someone who wants to have a summary of what an SEO has to be in 2011-2012.

The thing I like the most is: "What can we do as SEOs? Evolve!" This is THE thing every SEO should have in mind. Evolving is always a good thing, in a way or another. Maybe the thing I like the most in these days is you have to build true relationships with people you collaborate with , and with your users. I think, and honestly I hope, this will be the future!

Thanks for this Gianluca. I love the optimistic view you offer. What I gain from this is not assume anything about how Google operates - we are not in a mutually agreed relationship after all. This quotation below sums that up perfectly.

"When two people are really happy about one another, one can generally assume they are mistaken"

The game will always change and I for one am willing to embrace and adapt to the change. One thing I am very certain of is that there is not one size fits all, with SEO strategy and implementation. There are so many variables - its a mind blast to think about it sometimes.

I am of the impression that it is a poor strategy to try and outwit Google, and a better approach is to try and understand the landscape they keep changing and communicate within the community - I thank the universe for this community every day. Long live SEOMOZ and SEO!

This is very timely and very well said. I definitely agree wholeheartedly that the new sweet spot for optimization is at the intersection of search, social and trust.

For far too long Search Marketers have thought so much about gaming algorithms and such and forgot that we are dealing with people. I actually admire Google's efforts for trying to insert the person back as the main focus. It should be noted though that these things all work both ways. Social is a great way to find out about your audience rather than just a landfill to push out content. Once we have a good measure of trust/authority/influence (not Klout) that will be a great way to determine how worthwhile a link prospect would be and the link graph hasn't changed...but it just puts more of an emphasis on why we should be looking at it within context of keywords and subject matter.

Cannot agree more with what you say: "these things [social, content, seo] all works both ways".

About a good measure of trust/authority/influence, I suggest you to give a try to Peerindex, which seems far more precise than Klout (even though Dan Zarrella wrote today itself a somehow in Klout-defence post)... ah, Peerindex has APIs (wink wink).

All of this is great and nice, but there's a serious barrier that still exists, namely:I don't know a single person outside of SEO spheres who gives a hoot about Schema.org or understands what a "rel=author" tag even is. To make these sorts of things widely successful Google also needs to make them brain dead simple for the everyman to use; ie, the blogger.

The blogger, maybe that one using Blogger, maybe doesn't know what a is, but is signed as "author" as he use a Google product.

Anyway, I also think that we tend to undestestimate the knowledge of many of those we consider "not pro" bloggers: just think to all the mommies blogger, from whom we could learn tons about web marketing.

As I tweeted, I hope this post would be a kind of Manifesto. I see Google changes like challenges for SEOs, but I'm sure it can't put us down.

Among all the new innovations, I'm pretty excited with Schema.org. It's a way of humanizing the Internet. It's difficult yes, but we must find the way to turn it into our best friend in our particular battle (not war) against Google and its monopolistic behaviour.

It's so difficult to judge what will happen to organic results. There's no doubt that SEO is more important than it ever was, but it's also transforming at the same time. We as SEO's need to be 10 steps ahead at all times while juggling the mundane tasks as well. It's safe to say our jobs will become more difficult but also more important every time Google adds more complexity to it's layers.

Great article Gianluca, and terrific discussion afterwards. I find the different perspectives that mozzers bring so valuable in developing new ideas. For someone new to the industry these are tremendously helpful.

I'd say the new Google has been here for a few years now, prefer to call myself an online marketing professional as opposed to just an SEO.

Often comes down to available budget, however need to cover a variety of angles : SEO, PPC, Social, Local, Blog, Video, etc when possible, for best results for most clients, particularly when see projected CTR % for well ranked SEO keywords now as opposed to a few years back.

Good News in this post is that "SEO is not dieing" and SEO can't die because websites needs someone to take care of its. Whether it is on social sites or from quality content which is more desirable thing by user in website. After Google Panda update and more stronger presence of social sites in search engines rankings many seo experts are talking on this point that SEO Future is in the dark because of google panda update and from social networking sites.

Schema.org is intereseting point for us and till date we are not using this but after this we will start work on this.

Anyways Thanks @gfiorelli1 for this post to alert the seo's get up and tight your shoes because still so long way to cross for online marketing success.

Excellent points. What also bothers me about the recent google approach is that organic search results are being overwhemed by ads and google places pages. Three ads at the top of page one followed by one or two organic results followed by a handful of place pages and then a couple of organic results. Not sure how fresh or relevant (quality content) they are but there are sure becoming increasingly prominent

There is nothing like hearty debate to get the creative juices flowing and bring some clarity to that crystal ball we call “SEO” predictions.

For what it is worth, I think you are very right….G has 30,000 plus team members, many (but not all) are some of the smartest engineers on the planet and as such, you would expect that in their “brains trust” they are way, way, way ahead of the curve.

Yes, there may be the short term frustrations we all see when a page ranks well that doesn’t really deserve to be there…but overall, G gets a B+ and often and A…and they get that grade because they are always exploring, not just responding.

Looking at their patent submissions, their many micro-tweaks, some big mega-tweaks of late and some inklings hinted at by the elements you pointed out above, their investments in things like AI, they do have a plan…might be a constantly refined one, but still a plan…

And it’s our job to interpret that plan, use our own crystal ball and actually help Google by reverse engineering what they clearly “like” and then work with clients that genuinely deserve to “be there” to actually “get there”. Along the way though, as you rightly say, you still need a solid foundation of the fundamentals – the right keywords (written or spoken nowadays), the right technical infrastructure (both from a spidering and UI perspective – desk, tablet, smartphone), content that add value to the user and yes, a link and citation profile that works…and then the ability to build on that foundation as new resources or features start to appear.

About now the panic merchants start to bray, the bells start to toll and the SEO grim reaper appears announcing the demise of SEO…not the case at all, but perhaps the demise of SEO as we may know it now. Perhaps SEO may even move into actually leading the marketing message across all platforms, online and offline.

The cross-dependence between content, social and technical SEO is something I always try to communicate to my fellow colleagues who self-address themselves as "specialist". In my opinion, being an SEO is all about putting together a perfect merge of technical, linguistic and creativity skills.

It is nonetheless difficult not to have a hyper-critical view of Google these days, and I agree with you that is something more than Panda, something more than not provided...something more than the SEO ads question you pointed out recently in your blog post.

Anyway, we must be prepared and we have to keep learning, keep sharing knowledge and keep improving. That's why I will always be grateful to really illuminated people like you rather than those who, especially in my country, live just upon their supposed fame and never dare to make one step ahead.

Wither its PPC or organic results Google is trying to show what’s in the searchers mind, therefore they updated the Ads algorithm and incorporating social signals as a ranking factor does count much, but I would like to share a post here by Cyrus Shepard.

“Who” tweets your content used to be just as important, or more so, than the number of people retweeting your content. Can Google still calculate this in any meaningful way?

The question in my mind is, if Google can’t evaluate the actual worth of twitterer who actually twitted your content then does that means they are lacking somewhere in sucking the link value out of that tweet??

There are many shitty communities of spammers who share their links for just RT,Likes etc. Aren’t they spamming the social networks? But they still get link value out of it.

Therefore schemas could schemas be adapted to measure the worth and value of any particular person or business have their online presence.

I might be wrong but there must be something which is still unrevealed.

You have 99.99% of being right, and with this post I am not pretending to say I gave with the keys of Google. And quie surely the Googlers who maybe read it are shaking their heads confirming this comment :) [hi Matt].

tremendo Gianluca - you hit the inbound nail on the spot. Infact that term - inbounder - I bet will be more widely used in 2012.

Your ending comment: ...Because it can be gamed still, but – hopefully – needing so many efforts that it may become not-viable as a practice.

is where I fear that the not-viable part may unravel. I'm already seeing Schema abuse in the Serps for unverifiable snippet information that can lead to increased CTR. It's true that successful SEO will be ever more nuanced but I don't expect that the interest graph utopia that combats spam will be so smooth.

There is a lot going in the SEO bubble like Content is King, Social is Queen, Link Building is the SEO's Back born and I am not sure if there is something for On-Page as well…

Simply love the last diagram that you have posted! There is no one thing where Google is focusing and one of the reasons is because it’s easy to game. It is actually the combination of everything what Google is analyzing so the new SEO is simply hard to Game!

So we must develop the techniques to play with content, Social media and technical Seo at a same, yes I agreed its difficult task but guys guess what we are SEO’s we figure it out how to play with upcoming Google Game.

Surely there are ways to "game" Google... but is it this the correct way to think at SEO? As something which objective is to "game Google"? I don't think so... and I think that is the attitude that historically has caused:

How about these tips to beat google in his own game shared by aaron wall :-

Treat Google the same way they treat you. (If they start with contempt and suspicion, so should you).

Search using something other than Google as your primary search engine. (starve the beast of data)

Refuse to click on Google ads. (starve the beast of capital)

Test investing some portion of your AdWords budget on other ad networks. If Bing gives you a similar ROI as Google then it is better to spend as much as you can on Bing because having multiple channels & suppliers lowers your risk over being too dominant on one supplier.

Create walled garden content & community that is significantly better than anything that is available in the SERPs that people are willing to pay for it. (If Google extracts most of the value from the search ecosystem then keep some of your best information outside of that ecosystem.)

If you have a great content source that you value & do not want to see disappear find a way to pay them directly or indirectly. If they don’t charge & they don’t have a donate button on their site then demand they put one up. (I love iTulip.com & in addition to being a subscriber I have likely sent them dozens of other paying subscribers).

I really respect Aaron Wall and I also like the idea of having multiple channels for marketing but trust me leaving Google and choosing other as a primary search engine or refuse to click on PPC ads… this can be theoretically possible but in real life things aren’t work like that. I mean why would I not click on the PPC ad when it is hell related to my query? Or why I don’t use Google when they are providing me the best possible results that Bing and Yahoo don’t (for example)? #justathought

@gfiorelli...My apology sir, putting up that irrelevant points, but I thought if google will keep changing himself & will try to move away from SEO, we've to keep some options available to let them know what we (SEO's community) can do. Yes, but as you replied to @Ben below I understand it is almost impossible to make that happen. The only solution is that we've to improve our methods, techniques, thoughts, increase our SEO knowledge to keep clients & google happy.

@Moosa....Well, Bing also provides best possible results in line with Google but it's like we are so addicted to google that we hardly think or go to any other search engines.

I do not consider them irrilevant, and some are honestly interesting (i.e.: creating social walled garden)... simply my post was about how to take advantage using Google as it is now IMO evolving and not about escaping from it :D

Respected Sir you are right and I appreciate your approach. but our clients does not know much about SEO they only need traffic, sales and leads in very small time may be 1,2 months with huge success and its impossible to achieve it in very little time. I am not endorsing black hat SEO, this is truly an illegal way.

Every white have SEO have some gray area to play with Google to satisfied clients.

I have to deal with your same kind of clients... but if you explain well how things are, you can obtain them to understand that the real success - the one that last in times - is possible only following the seo-social-trust way.

Sir I got your point because I am a SEO not a big one (junior SEO) I have little bit of knowledge about SEO (20%) but they can’t. they are truly a layman. They did not know about the basic concept of link building.

You will be amazed that One of my client ask me what is link building. After giving a lecture on link building they only say Bla la bala. And said "I need business not links". Alas.

Great post Gianluca - We definately need to evolve, the goal posts keep shifting and we need to move accordingly :)

It's getting hard to define ourselves solely as SEOs these days! Search engines are only a part of the pie, albeit a big piece.

Google will be here for a while but the other third party sites (Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Yelp & more) are almost equal in terms of volumes & engagement - social media is becoming more and more important.

I enjoyed this article thanks. It's the first article I've read on here. I'm new so please go easy on me :-)Google is an evolving monster and it's hard to imagine what it will be like in future. It often confuses me but I get by (I think) by treating all content as primarily for users and not search engines. It seems to work although I am indeed here to learn from you guys.Take care allPeter

SEO is morphing but its hard to dispute the performance of Articles and Directories (they're performing very well for me). Linkbuilding is still the fundimental of all Search Engine Rankings & when you combine Traditional with Social (influence/trust/buzz across our multiple networks) it has put me straight into the sweet spot.

Rumors are rumors, and I wouldn't get over-stressed with them. What is certain is that since Vince every 15/18 months Google came out with some important update... so, judge yourself :).

By the way, my biggest suggestion is to do SEO the way you were doing it right now, adfirmation which I don't consider contradditory with my own post. What I mean is: do not loose your focus, which is:

analyse what data say to you;

optimize your site accordingly to those data (which imply a substantial fusion between SEO and CRO);

create content based on those data and on those ones you can understard filtering the social noise and that is worth to link/share

optimize the integration between SEO and Social Media in order both can benefit one each other.

become a thoughtful leader in your niche. A thoughtful leader is not necessaraly a Steve Jobs kind of person... it is simply to become the one you would think about to ask when you need something about a topic.

As a specific tactic, I would give a chance to Google+, both personal profile and brand page, because it is surely the first social signal source for Google.

But, finally, my biggest suggestion is to start think wider and start getting idea from all the web marketing disciplines, as SEO - IMHO - is getting to be a syncretic and scientific marketing art.

Sir I got all your point and hope it will help me in future but one thing I can’t understand as you say

“Become a thoughtful leader in your niche. A thoughtful leader is not necessarily a Steve Jobs kind of person... it is simply to become the one you would think about to ask when you need something about a topic”

When we work on a particular site its little bit clear that how we can achieve this influencer goal but the problem start when we work on different projects. How to influence people in this case? I am currently working on automotive, Pharmacy and employment niche and these are still growing my every project have totally opposite niches how one can tackle with this?

this is a very well done overview and completely agree and shre the same POV. It is going to become much more complex in understanding all the new dimensions of the real-time web combines with seo and what is deemed as quality. It really looks like Google has killers the long tail in the short run. at least until small to mid size sites and brands figure out how to compete effectively in this new Google scape.. what to do

Great post, love the graphs. Couldn't agree more on the perfect centers you've identified. A wholistic approach to search engine marketing has to move beyond anyone of those distinct realms (SEO, SMM, Content) and focus on a broader strategy of inbound marketing and user experience.

I completly agree with Justin HowleyI completely agree with you on this one. I think our jobs as SEO experts will be more and more important over time...I'm just waiting to see DeVry or ITT to start playing commericals...

...'do you want a changling job with a promising career, Call DeVry today and become an SEO expert'

Schema is very interesting but do you think SEO service providers should start including that in the scope of work they offer to their client? Properly configuring Schema requires will require a considerable amount of "man hours" which service providers will need to charge for. However, if direct benefits of those man hours is not visible or cannot be reported as of yet to the client, then it may pose a problem for the service providers in terms of convincing clients to pay that extra money. What do you guys think?

Yes, Schema is a pain in the... especially for already established huge sites. That is why, IMO, Google is taking its time in order to consider it one of the big factors (note, it should be needed a huge experiment to see how big is the correlation between Schema and rankings... maybe this may be done by SEOmoz).

But, being its reason to be to allow searches engines to better understand the real meaning of the content of a page, it is hard to not believe that those sites, which don't integrate Schema, will have an handicap respect the other that will start use it.

Finally, in order to convice clients about how interesting can be the use of Schema, we may use two methods:

Show them how studies are saying that Rich Snippet SERPs own an higher percentage of CTR;

Do a small scale integration of Schema in your client site, possibly in a strategic section, and verify with analytic the after and before data.

The handwriting was on the wall. It's not hard to predict where Google is going, and I've been preaching this for many months, all the while positioning my clients in preparation for this rebirth. Perhaps we should redub SEO to SEOCIAL?

Getting to this late, but wanted to tell you this is a good read and inspired a lot of my own thoughts. I am one of those who actually enjoy saying "content is king," being a writer. haha. Good writeup, gfio!

I think that there is some connection between the encrypted searches (keyword = not provided) and the possibility of SOPA passing. I believe that Google chose the lesser of two evils in order to have a system in place in which search data is not given out to anyone, including the government. Obviously, the down-side is that we don't get some (15ish%) of our highly useful information. The next step may be that only people signed in to Google will get free, uncensored and untracked search results (most likely and probably with ads still), while the rest of people using Google may see only restricted results which Google can share data about to the public, webmasters, and the government... which may seem to conform to SOPA restrictions before there are any in order to make SOPA unnecessary (if it doesn't pass, but is still brought up and debated from time to time). I don't know, just a thought. tl/dr - I think that Google is trying to keep information from being used if SOPA was to pass now, so that it can be used as a precedent if SOPA does pass.

One interesting thing about google is they don't teach you how to search. One advantage of being an SEO person is our ability to find what we are looking for. We rely on the fact that people want to use google or other search engines because they will type in a few basic words. We rank for those words. However, when we look up something for SEO purposes we rarely use basic language; it is usually littered with quotes, colons, tildas and whatever. I think to compete with google or any other search engine one would have to teach their clients how to find what they are looking for specifically. iimagine if you could turn off(from your search) any website that was trying to sell you something. That would be CRAZY! I mean it would make since, especially for someone who was looking for information about a product or service and just wanted the information.

interesting post...Google is changing everyday and that help us improve. When people talking about seo and how all this industry is changing its important to also notice that all this changes are maintly driven with the help of the permanent evolution of the google secret formula :)

Now google has set up Google+ transforming by the way seos experts into something between seo and community management! sometimes its important to take "all this noise" in the right way

Great post. I completely agree that social signals and author/publisher signals are going to be more important in the long run. Companies need to start building their credibility in every place they can.

Great post, Thanks for the reminder to all of us. I think sometimes we get on different kicks, infographic kicks, content kicks, link kicks, etc. and lose sight of the big picture. Thanks for reminding us to look at not only what we're putting out there for google and searchers but how we put it out there so that it can be seen.

how does one "snap her face" exactly? i get snap her neck, or slap her face....but snap her face....really? Anyways. IMO I don't really see the recent changes made by google as being counter-productive, or making my life that much harder. I do my basic on-page magic...i do my more advanced magic... i try and create content that has the potential of going viral or i create content that will grow links naturally within niche markets. I don't spend my days deciding whether content is king or if social is queen or if on-page seo is the ace in the deck. I know that content is king. I create it, and they come ... (sorry, had to use it). If a client wants leads, gather long tail traffic, incentivize your landing pages, drive conversions.

It seems like SERPs are a mythical beast to some of you Mozzers, and it is because you are trying to manipluate the system (obviously we all have tried to do it, one way or another), but that happy medium that everyone is going on about isn't anything new. Provide useful content to your users, and they will do the rest. Everything else should come secondary to that notion.

About your answers... written by someone who in is profile writes that dedicates 40 hours to SEO, well seems somehow a contraddiction. Do not take me wrong, I am a great believer of the centrality of content, but - as I wrote answering to another comment, contant alone is not enough... it is like a beautiful thing still not discovered by humans: beautiful, but unknown. Actually you have to create the opportunities to make that beauty to be discovered and to the right people, those ones who will start the loop: discovery > promotion > more people liking its beauty > more promotion and so and on.

So, and you know it being an SEO, that is our job... and what I've proposed in this post is how that place where so many beautiful things are hidden works and therefore, how we can help them to be discovered.

I'm not saying that SEO is not important, or that it is unworthy of our time. Im merely stating that without content (good content), no site will flourish on the interwebs let alone the SEs. One of the greatest lessons i have learnt with my time as an SEO is that CONTENT and CONTENT alone can make or break a website. Good content increases social shares, has the potential to go viral, can aquire the most links, creates trust, and most importantly, trully helps an end user.

It seems like a simple yet often overlooked notion, a sentiment reiterated in a few of the more recent content strategy webinars posted by SEOmoz: Content that is useful to users will inevitably rank well in SERPS. On page optimization, link building, and all the other magic i do in the 40 hours a week i put in, all comes AFTER i have decided what content to publish.

I do agree with you on some levels, i mean alot of the SEOs i talk to forget about the end user and focus heavily on how a SEbot will look/crawl their sites, and this is the wrong way to go about it.

Mmm... Do you want me to snap you? In fact I believe you misunderstood my post. It is true to say that sites must be user centered, but if don't do link building, if you site sucks on tech SEO, if you do not not do effective social media and you don't put all yourself in creating a trusted voice, the only ones who will come, maybe, will be your parents :D

Gianluca, nice post! Thanks for sharing... I have a question. When you say:

"If you are a blogger, you will be incentivized in marking your content with Author and link it to your G+ Profile, and as a Site, you are incentivized to create your G+ Business page and to promote it with a badge on you site that has the rel=”publisher” in its code."

Don't you think that if Google does this, it would be "unfair" for those people that do not want to have a Google+ account? Wouldn't Google be "pushing" its products on us? Don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly fine with Google and I like their products, but somehow this strategy, even though it might solve the spam issue, does not sound right.

Also, you give the following advice, which I'm not sure I understand:

"Tip: don't use the same social account for all the projects/clients you have, but create one for every of them and designed around the site you want to promote."

If I understand correctly, you are saying that we should create different (fake?) identities to promote different sites? This, again, does not sound right. It wouldn't be easy, either, because for those profiles to be "meaningful", they would also need to have also meaninful connections. If its a made up profile, how would anyone achieve that? Thanks again for sharing this great post. Please let me know about my two concerns, probably I'm not getting them right. Thanks!!!!

1) Google+. Yes, it can seem unfair, but not more than obliging a business to create a Page and connect your site with Open Graph if you want to do marketing with Facebook. More over, without entering into a long discussion about the "economy of G+" (I wrote a post about it in my blog in the past), Google right now needs social signals, and G+ is its only first hand source. But the important is not even Google+ itself, but the new Google profile, which invite us to tell to the people (and to Google) what other profiles about us (hence also social) exist in the web. That way Google can dig very deeply into our social connections and create what I define as "new" trustrank, and others call "author rank";

2) Fake social profile. I was not meaning bots, but brand/unpersonal profiles, like the SEOmoz one. I know that Roger is convinced it exists (and I saw him at MozCon), but it is not. It is a social persona which dialogue and interact with users and fans. But surely it is not fake.

Another option is the one used by Raventools, which separates clearly professional and personal social account of its employees, being the pro those one with the brand name as prefix (Raven) followed by the person name > raven_pratt, for instance.

Great post - if Google is going to make the Author tags etc work they are going to have to do some more shouting about them and also make them a bit less complicated for the average user to understand. Over the coming months trusted agents and interrelatedness algos are bound to play a much bigger role as ranking signals however I somehow can't help but think thatg whilst Larry Page is back at the top of Google it's likely that links will still play a very important role in determining the way in which we rank content, I don't see social signals being the be all and end all of ranking factors as Google needs to keep the serp results relatively stable so users aren't put off.

I agree with you, in fact I wasn't saying in my post that links are going to loose their importance. Simply my idea is that they are not going to be anymore the supreme ranking factor that rules them all.

Hi Gianluca - sorry I see that. My point was that I think with the changes at the top of Google recently although there will be a necessary drive to introduce more modern ranking signals which the social side of things will do, I can't see them moving away from the thing that has seen them right for so long. It's interesting to this debate that the Google Plus buttons are now being hidden in the search results unless you hover over them.

Excellent Vien Diagram's... I have been sharing something similar with my team for a few months now. It is important for all of us that want to remain in the Inbound Marketing biz to understand that like with all things, evolve or die.

Those folks who are providing blog & forum comment spam are the next to take a hit. It is now about showing all the right signals in all the right places. Content, Social and Links.

Everyone should be prepared to have the more "human" elements become more and more important over time.

A good article with some excellent points, however it would have been nice if someone had proof-read and edited it for better readability and better English when it was promoted to the main SEOMoz site. I re-read several paragraphs as I couldn't quite grasp what Gianluca was saying as the English was bad. As for "Snap her face", what does that even mean?!

Great Article. You have combined bits of what is floating out there together in a way that makes sense. Take care of technical first; then build social and trust. Even a non-SEO can understand what G+ designs are...now I need to get all my =rel authorships citations in line. Thanks

I agree with you, BUT I would ask you and everyone (mostly from USA) to stop generalizing against 3rd world link building. If you crawl Seomoz you can find many people who could be wrongly defined as 3rd world SEOs, who indeed are wonderful SEOs.
Why don't we atari talking about 3rd class service providers? In fact I know many living in the so called Western World who are far way worst than some of our Hindi/Pakistani/Philipino/latin American Mozzers dudes.

I agree, I am a Filipino trying to do SEO the proper way, continously educating myself about the industry, and being with the company of great people(seomozzers)

I will prove to you guys that somewhere down the road an SEO from a third world country can be as good as you over here.

The mere fact that it was the SEO guys from the 'first' world countries hiring service providers from our country truly reflects the kind of value we offer. It just so happen that most of my fellows fell on the wrong side of the fence.

Maybe its about time to look and ask yourself, the one giving out the instructions, putting together the SEO plan for the campaigns, hiring people from a third world country like ours.

When a campaign succeeded you take all the credit, but if it fails, you blame your third world country service providers. Don't you think it's fair?

PS: I finally made my first comment here at SEOMOZ, thanks to Jeff. :)

I'm really wondering what Google will look like a year from now. Will there still be organic results? They've got such a lionshare on the net, that a lot of people think of Google as soon as someone mentions the Internet. I mean they're even listed on Dictionary.com as a verb!

They're transforming from a free to use information hub to a paid-to-be-seen platform. Simply because they can probably get away with it. I really wish engines like Bing would get more visibility in order to put Google in it's place.

I don't think there's any stopping Google. Best thing to do is to understand how "Google" thinks and where its looking to head, which the author has presented nicely. PPC, well, that should most definately be part of an SEOs arsenal!

(Each client has diffrent needs and we need to accomadte those needs instead of pushing our service)

Well put David. I believe that there are to many companies out there just trying to sell a product and make a quick buck rather than really catering to the clients needs and trying to sell them what could give them the best ROI.

Also to clarify I am not saying that those companies products are not any good, some may be fanominal but just not what the client may need at that spacific point in time.

it is really about finding the right online marketing mix which has the highest return on investment. Sometimes SEO is a waist of money and the customer would have a far better ROI when he would do PPC instead. For some customers social could go viral for others it would be a waist of resources.

Yea...as per my experience in the industry SEO and PPC works well together. Lots of people have a misperception that PPC campaigns can be done easily than search engine optimization. However, In order to keep the Return On Investment of a Pay Per Click campaign higher, your company needs to invest time and effort in factors like analyzing the campaign, bids management, creating and writing new advertisings. SEO is all about an investment of time and experience, the more you do it, the more you learn to do; PPC requires a contant flow of money, time, experience.

Moosahemani, I did see the article you refer to about the survey, but it only contains a screenshot which I can't place in any content since there isn't any more information. I think the data is probably not as accurate as it might suggest because from experience, I find that most SMB owners tend to think that everything that has to do with either their site or Google falls under the SEO blanket.

If you follow the front page changes Google has made, and is making, you can't deny that organic ranking is getting less and less visibility.

The problem with historic data is that it's only indicative of a high probably move going forward - for a short time only.

A bit like when all the real estate agents yelling 'BUY NOW - Property has grown 100% in the last 10 years" - then all of a sudden - it CHANGED, bigtime!

For the last 5 or so years - checking on all the blogposts of matt cutts and others - my findings were that (usually), the CHANGES google published, were already occurring at least a year or 2 before the event being spoken about...and by the time matt pops out to speak again about something, OTHER CHANGES are already taking place - it's like you have to be at least 2 years ahead of what the google posts are telling us!

There's really only 2 reasons for this:

The googler's (upstairs) don't really know what's going on (downstairs) for at least 2 years ....or

google do this on purpose to throw SEO's off there game.

Personally, I think it's the 2nd reason - but, you never know sometimes:)

Trading the financial markets are a great education in backtesting (historic) data - you design a trading strategy based on historic numbers - the backtests show fantastic stats on your equity curve - BUT - try using that same strategy going forward (no longer than say, 6 months) - it grows your equity curve positively - THEN - your equity curve is now going down, sometimes dramatically!

For years I scratched my head over this - how could this be, it didn't make any sense - UNTIL - I discovered a phenomena called CURVE-FITTING. If you are not familiar with this, I suggest you do a search on it as the science behind it is somewhat lengthy to discuss here.

The solution to this problem could only be, the trading strategy has to dynamically change it's parameters moving forward, in order for the results to remain positive. I personally use only a small amount of historic data - optimize - then apply it for a small time (only) in the future - so far so good:)

In the case of SEO - change is inevitable if you want to stay on top of it - and right now, all i can see is google have pulled some big changes over the past year that caught a lot of people off guard (Panda updates) - except for the people that were probably checking out all the caffine updates going on for a year prior to that - and i think we all know how deep one had to dig in order to get the bottom of that one - I didn't see any official posting from google on that - unless i missed something? :)

Google (NOW) is giving most of it's weight to BIG BRANDS - because market research shows higher CTR's doing this. The other big factor is DUPLICATION - this is now a big no-no.

Look at the authority google give to twitter & facebook - why? Because they have BUZZ - and BUZZ=SOCIAL - a ready made audience that google needs.

As far as SEO compliance is concerned with these 2 sites, is almost nil - they are both coded in a very non- friendly SEO way - lol - they don't even have SiteMaps.xml files - because they don't have to!

Google 'LIKE' these sites more than the little webpage with the perfect SEO structure - make no mistake about that. It was somewhat evident about 3 years ago - it is blantantly obvious nowadays.

I feel your worries, but - sincerely - I am starting to get bored by this kind of negative attitude. What is organic search? Is it just the classic snippet? Aren't local search, video and image results, news snippets organic search too?

Because if you look at organic just like the old classic SERPs' snippet, well, you should have past to PPC almost 2 years ago. But that is - honestly - a quite miopic view of Google; in fact I see the blended search as a wonderful opportunity to enhance my organic search presence in Google and a not so subtle invitation in delivering websites, which can be valuable in their topic for every kind of content Google index and categorize.

Then, about the "free to use information hub"... since the adquisition of AdWords Google is not just that. When people will start to understand that Google is a gigantic Freemium product? The free part is its Search Engine, and it is the most valuable tool Google has in order to make people come again and again and, therefore, obtaining revenues from the Paid Searches. So, IMO, to think that Google is deliberately killing organic search is not correct, because the more universal organic searches are neglected the more people slowly will move away from Google, with the logical economic loss for Google due to less search market share.

Finally, as Moosa and Creative Chaos already commented, I don't understand this sort of idiosincracy some SEOs have for PPC. Yes, I don't like to do PPC either, but - when correctly done - it is a great online marketing tactic, which can complement organic searches and offer grear insights also to SEOs about the end users behaviors in your site.

Oh, I don't have a problem with PPC at all. I'm just speaking my mind about what I think Google is doing. And I do see it as a negative development, hence my negative attitude towards the double standards they constantly seem to work with. We have to live with Google these days because they're the 800 lb gorilla on the web, and lots of us are scared of losing traffic if we don't play along with them, just not many of us like to admit it.

You're absolutely right about them being a freemium product, but I just feel they've playing a very slow bait and switch tactic on us. They just keep pushing the boundries to see how far they can go imo.

they have all the rights to experiment with its own business model, and they don't have any other place where to do it if not SERPs;

Gorillas, Elephant, Dinosaurs... to follow the animal metaphor, they all can be won and eaten by the small legionary ants... so, if SEOs and Marketers show themselves as a compact force working together, they can obtain things... maybe it is not a strategic change but, for instance, two non-sensical ads (Forget SEO... and SEO with Google...) had been retired.

English isn't Gianluca's first language, I figured out instantly that this is the reason why... jumping straight to sexism isn't really fair when so many non-English languages have different perspectives for male and female... it's a very common mistake and obviously he wouldn't have meant anything by it.

The term "Giving the benefit of doubt" comes to mind when grammatical errors are made by people who's mother tongue is not what they're writing in... If I tried to write a post in Italian there would be a lot more mistakes than that lol.

In fact it was not my intention to under estimate Bob's vision, simply I have in mind that almost 80% of the clicks still goes to organic serps, of any kind, so... even though Google is putting paid search every where, organic is still playing and - imho - will play a big part in the Google game.

I agree with you! Whether you like the PPC model or not - I don't really see how one can work efficiently as an SEO for any larger commercial project without collaborating closely with the SEA people by synchronizing the strategies and make them as sustainable as possible.

If one steps outside the SEO world for a moment, does the average user want all these bells and whistles with his search. It is my opinion that many users just want to find a page on the internet, they don’t want too much clutter, they don’t want to have to understand, they don’t want to have to think, they dont want change, they just wants simple search, google+ seems to me to be a danger for Google being taken seriously.

I think it's important to remember how much Google has actually done. Before Google was properly established, investors were pouring money into content portals and hubs that were already crammed with ads. Google's whole advertising model was completely different. The web would be completely different without them - we may have never progressed further than basic search facilities from content portal sites like AOL.

But if you are truely a good SEO you would already be heavily involved with PPC teams, I mean I work very closely on large accounts with paid teams sharing data and working on cross campaigns where we use various strategies working together. I have done a fair bit of PPC, I don't hate it, I just dont like paying for clicks and when you have driven millions and millions of visitors from SEO which you have created by hand over the years why pay hundreds of thousands for it ;)

Some great points Bob, you had me until I read the last sentence of what you said. I still think SEO is the answer I just think we need to put Google in check and let them know that they are not the only choice for users. Then, and only then, will they start to become more user (seo) friendly again.

Instead of thinking about organic search, think of it as organic discovery (versus paid discovery). The trend that Google et. al. is reacting to is a shift in behavior.

If I am a mother (some have called me that) and I want to know if a certain formula is good, the trend now is to ask on Facebook and check the search results to confirm. Not just go straight to Google and search. The forum is being replaced with FaceBook and Plus.

Google doesn't really care about social anything, they are now playing catchup and want to be a choice for the future so they are adding it to their score.

That being said, PPC should be part of the whole discovery equation anyway.

I'd be quite surprised if there were any significant number of SEO's that didn't already know how to use PPC to be honest... I suspect that the majority have used, and do use it as well as SEO. My old agency used to offer both services but stopped offering PPC to focus instead on purely organic as there's so much more to it, we didn't want to be a jack of all trades, master of none... we wanted to be specialists who excelled in that one area. I must admit, there are new aspects of PPC that I have no knowledge of now because of that choice but it's pretty simple compared to SEO (Proper SEO I mean) so I'm confident I could pick it all up again pretty quickly.

I prefer SEO anyway, I think of it like this:

PPC = New Media version of paid ads in a newspaper

SEO = New media version of worthy story or editorial in a newspaper that requires no payment for the ad as it's what the newspaper is made and bought for in the first place :)

If back before the internet there were newspapers that were filled with just ads alone, I doubt many people would have bought them :)